The booking of healthcare appointments has long been handled via telephone and within a specific group of affiliated healthcare practitioners. The reasons for this are many, including the need to match a great variety of patient needs with the available physician resources, the desire of physicians to maintain control over their working hours and practice, which are essentially dictated by their appointment schedules, the affiliations among insurance companies, plans, fee schedules and accepted procedures, and the patient's desire and comfort level with selecting their own physician.
As a result, prior attempts to automate this process have generally been unsuccessful. The human receptionist in the doctor's office continues to be central focal point for booking an appointment from the viewpoint of both the physician and the patients. The receptionist has the required knowledge base to satisfy both the needs and comfort levels of the physicians in the practice group and their patients. However, telephone based booking of healthcare appointments is time consuming and very often inconvenient for the patient. For example, call in times are limited to the receptionist's working hours and the volume of calls being handled by the receptionist. Still further, the above scenario assumes the patient has a preexisting relationship with a physician, and that physician has a convenient or acceptable appointment time for the necessary procedure. Finding a new physician is even more time consuming for the patient, involving researching potential local practice groups, physician backgrounds, and calls to see whether the physician is accepting new patients. Thus, while there is much room for improvement, there has been very little success in implementing an alternative process for booking healthcare appointments.